The effect of information mobility on production quality

This article investigates the use of a hand-held unit as an information source in manual assembly. Having a mobile information system, such as a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), that can be brought at all times, as opposed to a stationary one, such as a computer terminal, is hypothesised to increase the information range and thus improves assembly performance. The increased information range is argued to be due to assembly workers employing a cost–benefit strategy, where the cost of gathering information is compared with the assumed benefit of it. This article reports empirical data comparing the use of a mobile information carrier with a traditional stationary computer, and results show that the use of a PDA significantly improves quality, whereas productivity does not significantly improve quality.

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